Director Rob Reiner's crusade to destroy movie romance began in 1989 with "When Harry Met Sally ..." a film whose subtle message was that the best thing a beautiful woman like Meg Ryan could aspire to was Billy Crystal. Ten years later, he made "The Story of Us," about the horrors of marriage, and followed that up with "Alex & Emma," which extolled the joys of bland domesticity over passion. But he was just warming up for "Rumor Has It," in which he repeats his anti-passion message and actually makes Jennifer Aniston appear unattractive for long stretches of screen time.

The movie has that fatal triptych that is becoming Reiner's romantic-comedy signature: drippy sentiment, zany scenes that trivialize the characters and a horror of adventure. In a Reiner movie, if the protagonist has the choice between an exciting life partner and a comfortable life partner, the movie will always come down on the side of the comfortable, which might make sense in life terms, but in dramatic terms is death. Even the chaste films of the '30s and '40s had more faith in impulse and instinct. Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford almost always took a chance, and Olivia de Havilland usually ended up with Errol Flynn.

It's a wonder that Aniston is able to survive her first scene. She is on a plane with her fiance (Mark Ruffalo), looking hangdog and talking like a fool. She insists they have sex in the airplane bathroom, and after a bit of unsuccessful fumbling, she bursts into Lucy Ricardo-type tears, whining about how she doesn't know what he sees in her. This is precisely what the audience is wondering, and precisely what the audience did not at all wonder while watching "Derailed," in which Aniston played a femme fatale. She's 36, and the statute of limitations has run out on Aniston's playing immature women with only two brain cells to rub together. She's attractive and mature enough to do better. It's time.

The fictional story derives from a real-life rumor that the family depicted in the 1967 film "The Graduate" was based on a real Pasadena family. Aniston plays Sarah, a daughter of that family, who, as the story begins, is on her way home for her sister's wedding. Sarah is a mess, emotionally needy and engaged to a man she's not sure she wants to marry.

In the "Graduate" mythology, Sarah is the daughter of the Katharine Ross character, who, in this movie's construct, ultimately left the Dustin Hoffman character and returned home to marry the other guy. (Years later, she died.) After a conversation with her bawdy, caustic grandmother (Shirley MacLaine as the Mrs. Robinson prototype), Sarah gets the idea that she might not be the daughter of the man she calls her father, after all, but rather that she might be the daughter of the Dustin Hoffman character. By 1997, the year in which the movie is set, this fellow has grown from a loser into a rich Internet big shot -- at least he didn't go into plastics. As played by Kevin Costner, he's also a lot younger, taller and better looking than might be expected.

Sarah's search for Daddy is a search for meaning, and the scenes between Aniston and Costner have a current of felt emotion that elevates the film. She is looking for guidance, for a future, while he looks at Sarah and remembers her mother and an idyllic interlude from his youth. Sad longing, the accumulated regrets of a lifetime and a dignity wide enough to feel these emotions, acknowledge them and express them without getting lost in them -- these are things that Costner can do well, perhaps better than anyone else onscreen.

Aniston is charming, of course, and once she gets past the hideous introductory scene, she is able to make Sarah into an appealing woman with a stumbling sort of intelligence. But I'd love to see an Aniston movie that didn't depend on her charm for its survival. "Derailed" was like that, not a particularly strong movie, but a step forward. This is treading water. Similarly treading water is MacLaine as the tough old dame. One of these days, some screenwriter is going to shock the world by writing a nice old lady role into a picture. They're very underrepresented.

Yet, needless to say, "Rumor Has It" fails as a successor to "The Graduate." It fails artistically but also philosophically, in that it rebuts the spirit of the earlier film, while offering nothing attractive in its place. In "The Graduate," stock tips were a punch line; here, they're the Holy Grail. In "The Graduate" passion was a guide; here it's a detour. Maybe it only makes sense. Maybe people are getting married later and wiser today, skipping the disastrous first marriage to Zelda and moving straight into the relationship with Sheilah Graham, as it were.

Still, this is not doing our love stories any good.

-- Advisory: Sexual situations and the side of Jennifer Aniston's right breast, as glimpsed for one provocative second.

To hear Mick LaSalle talk about movies, download his podcasts at sfgate.com/blogs/podcasts.